Western civilization dare not rest on its laurels, warns Professor Molnar, because its laurels are laced with philosophical and religious errors that threaten to topple it. The “pagan temptation”—the ancient pantheism, monism, and mysticism largely displaced by the Christianization of the West—now threatens to “repaganize” the Western world. And, ironically, if Christianity cannot alter its...
2050 search results for: Supreme%25252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252BCourt
Post
No More Nonsense About Elites
From the October 2001 issue of Chronicles. A fish starts rotting from the head, it is said. That a society starts rotting from its head needs to be much better understood. Blaming the decline of Western society on a “revolt of the masses” absolves elites, who must bear the brunt of the blame. Catering to...
Post
Now, the Left Owns It All
That mob that split off from the Donald Trump rally of Jan. 6 to invade the Capitol has proven a godsend to the left. The death of a Capitol cop has enabled the left—which spent the summer after George Floyd’s death trashing “racist cops” and shouting, “Defund the Police!”—to posture as fighting allies of the...
Post
History as Paranoia
There are many conservative, intelligent people who will happily tell you that there is no such thing as the absolute truth of history, only different, mutually complementary versions. History, they will say, is a mutable, fluid continuum, whose multiple truths are constantly undergoing revision and revaluation in one another’s reflected light, as well as in...
Post
On Liberalism and Catholicism
James Hitchcock, in his review of my Heart of the World, Center of the Church (“City of Man, City of God,” September), argues that the book is “the summing up of a controversy over a . . . specifically Catholic . . . view of politics” which pits me against certain neoconservative Catholics and, behind...
Post
Government: Good or Bad? Big or Little?
Toward the beginning of De Caelo (On the Heavens), Aristotle makes the well-known remark that “the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold”—or, as it is sometimes phrased, “a small error in the beginning leads to a large error later on.” We can easily see that this is true, whether in...
Post
The Distributist Alternative: A Voluntary Safety Net
As an economic concept, distributism refers to a broad, voluntary distribution of wealth in land, labor, and capital. The idea has its origins in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum novarum, which rejected Marxism and capitalism’s laissez-faire variant, and in the works of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Belloc’s Servile State (1912) recognizes that...
Post
Blood Relations
In 1840, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” an unsuspecting public scarcely realized it was witnessing the birth of a new genre that would actually become the most ecumenical of all literary forms. Since Poe’s time, the detective story has flourished among readers of every...
Post
Immigrant Birthright
Any doubts you may have had about the absurdity and falseness of American electoral politics would have been removed if you had lived through the barrage of advertising that preceded our South Carolina presidential primary. Every single one of the Republican candidates pretended to have become Horatio at the Bridge, single-handedly holding back the onslaught...
Post
Tocqueville, Santayana, and Donald Trump
“To be an American,” George Santayana said, “is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.” For Americans and non-Americans alike, the American people has seemed a recognizable and describable breed from the earliest years of the Republic down to the 21st century, despite America’s reputation as a nation hospitable to immigration...
Post
For the Children
“I figured if he was there, I’d make sure he wasn’t there [again],” Harlan Drake, a 33-year-old truck driver, told Det. Sgt. Scott Shenk of the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department. But on the morning of September 11, 2009, James Pouillon was there, sitting across the street from Owosso High ...
Post
The Candidate
She’s embarrassing and unpredictable, known as a “gadfly” and a “maverick” (among other names). She admits she’s never been a joiner. She has alienated both political parties and the Minnesota media. There are no topics on which she doesn’t have a strong opinion and no circumstances under which she would stifle any opinion. One cringes...
Post
Enemies Right and Left
“Liberalism is too often merely a way of speaking.” —Oscar I. Janowsky Until the day he died in April 1964, John T. Flynn insisted that he was a liberal. Once, that self-designation had not been controversial. This was a man who, as a member of the New York City Board of Higher Education in the...
Post
The God With Feet of Clay
Liberty: The God That Failed is Christopher Ferrara’s second 90-caliber salvo against liberalism, left and right. His first, The Church and the Libertarian: A Defense of the Catholic Church’s Teaching on Man, Economy, and State, smashed the anti-Christian dogma of Austrian economics. This 699-page tome goes further. It will send the neocons into the corner...
Post
End the Feds
James Comey’s curious and unorthodox contributions to the media’s rumor-fueled hysteria over the legitimacy of the Trump presidency—and perhaps the fate of the U.S. government and the American people—ought to raise a fundamental question in the minds of conservatives: Why did he have a job to begin with? It matters little whether we like the...
Post
Andrew Lytle and the Cultivation of American Letters
The name of Andrew Lytle should be better known than it is: he has been a distinguished novelist and author of some widely anthologized short stories; an essayist, historian, and memoirist; an editor of the Sewanee Review for many years; and a teacher of creative writing at the University of Florida and the University of...
Post
US Out of Dixie
Browsing at a local newsstand the other day, I spied a startling comic book, issue #11 of Captain Confederacy. Its $1.95 price was even more startling (the last comic book I bought, back about aught-56, cost something like 15 cents), but I had to take this one home, and did. Let me tell you about...
Post
Freedom of Conscience
The Illinois legislature recently overrode Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s veto of what the newspapers are describing as mandatory-school-prayer legislation. Predictably, the state’s editorial pages are filled with denunciations of this arbitrary attempt to impose religion on the helpless children of Illinois, but in fact, the new law, requiring a minute of silence at the beginning of...
Post
Paz
“Amazed at the moment’s peak, flesh became word—and the word fell.” —Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows Upon a confirmed gringo like me, contemporary Spanish language poetry makes much the same impression as contemporary Spanish or Latin American concert music. Broad prairies of cadenza enclose a garden patch of melodic theme, an orotund thunder of...
Post
The French Revolution in Three Acts
Taken as a whole, the French Revolution, like any other historical event, may be understood in many ways. Excluding material or circumstantial causes, I see it as a sort of drama, each act of which is performed by characters—sometimes the same, sometimes different—who all, driven by some idea, strive to achieve a certain goal that...
Post
Are Abortion & Gay Rights American Values?
“My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life,” said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. “I accept my church’s position on abortion as . . . doctrine. Life begins at conception. . . . I just refuse to impose that on others.” For four decades, Biden backed the...
Post
Fatal Amendments
Enthusiastic defenders of the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution are fundamentalist cultists—and women and minorities are their victims. At least, that is the thesis of University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks’ new book, The Cult of the Constitution, an unforgiving disparagement of the Constitution’s white male origins and the allegedly unwoke...
Post
Snow Princess Does Beijing
Poor Gu Ailing, or, as we call her here in the country of her birth, Eileen Gu. She claims to have jumped ship to join the Chinese team for this year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing because she hoped to inspire young athletes on both sides of the Pacific, and to spread goodwill between the nation...
Post
My Vote Still Counts
Back in 2004, I was part of the 62% of Ohio voters who supported a referendum to amend the Ohio Constitution to define marriage as “a union between one man and one woman.” Last week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided, in a 2 to 1 decision, that my vote—and those of some 3....
Post
The Undemocratic Coup
In effect, the Democrats have successfully executed nothing short of a coup d’état, the first in American history.
Post
What the Editors Are Reading: November 2020
The Politics may be the most influential study of political theory and political practice ever written. Aristotle put the book together while investigating different regimes in the Greek world and elsewhere. The philosopher denies the existence of an ideal government applicable to all societies; instead, he looks at various governments that are appropriate for different peoples in...
Post
Two Skeptics
H.L. Mencken has been given a fairly free ride by his various biographers. That ride is now officially over. It might have ended even sooner, had Terry Teachout been able to make up his mind about his subject. For years, Teachout has advertised himself as being “at work” on a biography of Mencken. Now, the...
Post
The Reign of Grantham
“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.” —T.H. Huxley Media commentators covering David Cameron’s incumbency as Tory leader have remarked—often gleefully—on how unpopular Cameron’s Labour-like policies are with the “traditional right.” By this, they mean the Thatcherite rump of the party (probably still the numerical...
Post
Faces of Clio
From the October 1986 issue of Chronicles. “The obscurest epoch is today.” —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage. As one of the...
Post
Constitutional Convention Would Open Pandora’s Box
Despite the increasing volume on both the right and the left of calls for a constitutional convention, the solution to our problems is not to change the Constitution or even throw it out, but to obey it.
Post
Islam: The Score
“We are divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way—divided by separate independent national rivalries, by the warring interests of possessors and dispossessed—and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the Christian cement, has crumbled.” —Hilaire Belloc Neither Christians nor Jews can claim that...
Post
Nationalism Über Alles
There are probably as many theories of nationalism as there are nationalisms. Quite apart from the often extremely complex typologies used to classify nationalism, there are two principal definitions worth noting. In the first sense, nationalism is defined as a more or less voluntary aspiration of a people to establish itself as a nation, whether...
Post
Trump and the GOP
In Our Interest Another Chronicles read cover to cover, with great delight. Srdja Trifkovic’s essay “Travel Ban, and Beyond” (The American Interest, August) was a thoughtful and excellent argument for a closer examination of immigrants and visitors to our great land. Thank you for another excellent issue. —Mayor David Theiss Ellaville,...
Post
Odysseys
O Brother, Where Art Thou? Produced by Buena Vista Pictures and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Joel Coen Screenplay by Ethan Coen with help from Homer Released by Buena Vista Pictures All the Pretty Horses Produced by Columbia Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Billy Bob Thornton Screenplay by Ted Tally from a novel by Cormac...
Post
The Heart of Darkness
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete indifference. When the Northern Illinois...
Post
Forlorn Hopes
Writing your Congressperson. An unindicted Illinois governor. The American people ever understanding that government debt does not exist to cover necessary expenditures but to provide risk-free, tax-free income to capitalists. American leaders ever understanding the difference between defense and aggression. American leaders ever understanding the concept of “blowback,” that what goes around comes around. President,...
Post
Trump Dumps the Do-Nothing Congress
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull...
Post
Portrait of a Failed Society
To paraphrase one observer of Albanians, “Mexico is not a society with corruption; Mexico is a corrupt society.” Mexico has been undergoing a social crisis since the end of the Partido Revolutionario Institucional’s 71-year monopoly on political power. Gone is the state’s patronage of competing interests, populism that succeeded by co-opting all opponents. The coffers...
Post
Can Humanity Forget What It Knows?
Civilization hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their...
Post
From MLK to CRT
Martin Luther King cannot be retrofitted as a conservative. He was at heart an activist of the left, and his ideas were in large part a precursor to critical race theory.
Post
The Horrible Politics of “Equality for All”
Equality is a pernicious and dangerous political policy, but that’s exactly what President Obama declared in full voice in his Second Inaugural Address in January as the cause and preoccupation of his administration for the next four years. Of course equality in the abstract is meaningless. It becomes concrete only when we figure out what...
Post
Suicide State
“We don’t divorce our men; we bury them,” instructs Stella Bernard, played by a loony Ruth Gordon, in Lord Love a Duck (1966). That’s certainly better social policy than America has pursued since 1970, with no-fault divorce shattering families. No custody battles. No brawls over alimony and child support. No kids shuttled back and forth...
Post
Our Little War in Kosovo
After ethnic Albanian guerrillas initially rejected the peace settlement fashioned by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a friend of hers told Newsweek that “She’s angry at everyone—the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO.” Another Clinton administration official raged: “Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothing-balls to do something entirely in their...
Post
Trump—Once and Future King?
“I don’t know if he’ll run in 2024 or not. But if he does, I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.” So says Mitt Romney, the sole Republican senator to have voted twice to convict President Donald J. Trump of impeachable acts. But is it possible Trump could win the nomination in 2024? What...
Post
The Means and Meanings of Western Culture
“Ye that make mention of the LORD, keep ye not silence.” —Isaiah 62:6 I am holding in my hands a scatola musicale the size of a matchbox, which somebody gave me the other day as a frivolous keepsake. You can buy one just like it in any souvenir shop in Venice for two, maybe three dollars. ...
Post
On the Free Market
Llewellyn Rockwell’s article “How the Market Stamps Out Evil” in the December issue was challenging. But whereas his superb philippic on the presidency in the October issue (“Down With the Presidency“) left me baying at the moon, this time I was unconvinced. Can capitalism really be set against a tyrannical government as a force for...
Post
Is Thomas Woods a Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 3
Next we must look at another rhetorical device of Woods which serves to distract the attention of the reader from the point at issue and to prejudice him against what I actually wrote. Woods mentions the interventions of bishops’ conferences into economic matters. As a matter of fact I said absolutely nothing in my article...
Post
Serial Killer
The New York Times, in a 2,128-word obituary (nearly three times the length of this article), fondly recalled Jack Kevorkian as “A Doctor Who Helped End Lives.” Kevorkian, 83, the Michigan pathologist turned assisted-suicide activist, died in a hospital, a more dignified locale than the 1960’s-era Volkswagen microbus where he uncorked the Thanatron, his suicide...
Post
Congress’s Romance with Cowardice
War Without War Powers (the Not-So-New American Way) On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate and said, “Every Senator [here] is partly responsible for sending...
Post
Gettysburg Agitprop
The field of Gettysburg is perhaps the closest thing to a sacred place, a Mount Olympus, to be found in our secular-minded land. The battle itself contains enough epic material for the admiration, contemplation, and inspiration of a hundred generations of Americans, if there should be so many. This is all lost on the U.S....